First Baby Poems
60 pages • ISBN: 978-19342899-1-4
Rocky Ledge Cottage Editions, 1982.
Expanded edition: Hyacinth Girls, 1983.
Third edition: BlazeVOX [books], 2009.
With her warm subtle fleshy FIRST BABY POEMS Waldman creates an infant power that did not exist before in her words. These poems are complex joyful bioalchemy.
—Michael McClure
Whenever my friends give birth, I always send them the words of William Blake's "Infant Joy" ("What shall I call thee?"/'I happy am,/Joy is my name.'/Sweet joy befall thee!") and a xeroxed copy of Anne Waldman's FIRST BABY POEMS - long unavailable and now happily reprinted - for their delectation: twenty-nine joyful, lucent poems in all manner of styles and song. It is no matter of a "hard sell" to suggest that FIRST BABY POEMS is a "perfect gift" for those who are birthing and those who are busy being born. Sweet joy befall them.
—Jonathan Cott
Anne Waldman glows even in the throes of morning sickness at the Buddhist chateau. The mind empties as the belly expands, but the mind doesn't clear without a detailed expression of what it is letting go of, and the body doesn't fill without a rich chronicle of sensation. She takes us all the way to term and then, the baby gets the pantoums. What a retreat she takes us on. What a euphonic spell of sleep-deprived wonder she casts.
—C.D. Wright
Rocky Ledge Cottage Editions
1982
Saddle-stitched in wrappers
With drawings by Patricia Padgett
Reading from First Baby Poems
April 2018
From Don Yorty:
I came across First Baby Poems by Anne Waldman on my bookshelf not long ago and opened it to find an old Amtrak train ticket from the early 1980s—bookmarking the page with the poem, Sonne. I remember the first time I heard First Baby Poems; it was at a reading Anne was giving—maybe at the Gotham Bookstore—anyway wherever it was I was enthralled. What could be more compelling than a poet writing about having and raising her baby boy?
I asked Anne if I could record her reading from First Baby Poems, and she said yes. We met at her childhood home where she still lives on MacDougal Street. Though Houston is only a block away and noisy with booming trucks and ambulances, when she began to read her loving lyric poems—I call them songs—that come so naturally to her, timeless and as new as when I first heard them (or the day you were born), Houston Street quieted down. Dear reader, I am convinced NYC wants you to hear First Baby Poems. Enjoy.
First Baby Poems (with collages by George Schneeman) has been republished by BlazeVOX[books].